A few years ago, many of us were still using those little 3.5 inch floppy disks to save our principal data on. While these magnetic disks shielded in a flimsy plastic casing were the best and most movable selection most of us had, they were far from perfect. At what always seemed to be the most inopportune time, our floppy disks would fail and/or loose our homework assignments for school, a presentation for work, or those prominent backups from our personal banking software. We struggled for a better way. While company relied on large hard drives and other forms of magnetic media such as tape drives to store their prominent information, the average joe had to keep packing around those lovely little floppy disks, hoping and praying that we wouldn't crook our mouths the wrong way and ruin the floppy.

Thankfully, man (namely Dov Moran in 1998) came up with the great little idea of a Usb thumb drive. You may know this lovely little piece of tool by one of its many other names: Flash drive, pen drive, jump drive, thumb drive...the list goes on and on. But what has made these thumb drives so popular? Are they good for whatever other that storage? How much data can they hold?

Drives

Popularity

First things first, let's talk about the wild popularity of thumb drives. For one, they are virtually impervious to scratches, dents, drops that plagued floppy disks, and to some extent, contract discs. I personally have washed (and dried) a thumb drive on any occasions, with no ill effect. (I personally would not suggest this as a testing point for your thumb drive. I didn't set out to test mine that way and if I weren't so forgetful, my poor little thumb drive would never have been subjected to such a test!)

Portability is another benefit that thumb drives offer that was sorely lacking in floppy disks. everyone used to carry around their floppy in the back pocket of their pants; a disaster waiting to happen. Thumb drives absolutely slip in a pocket, or in most cases, come with a lanyard for hanging around your neck for easy access. Just be sure that when you buy a thumb drive, don't get one where the lanyard attaches to the cap! Your highly rugged and movable thumb drive will do you no good if it falls off your lanyard and lands in the middle of the road. Not even a thumb drive can stand up to the pure force of a tractor-trailer.

Functionality

Yes, thumb drives were originally designed as a movable storehouse device. But now, they good for so much more. Thumb drives have come to be popular with Pc technicians as there are a lot of diagnostic tools that can be run from a thumb drive, even to the point of having an entire operating system that can boot from the thumb drive.

There are any programs (with more being added all the time)
that can run from a thumb drive. U3, a company back by SanDisk and M-Systems, develops applications specifically formatted so they can be launched from a Usb thumb drive. U3 provides improvement tools to associates that wish to make a version of their software that can be used from a thumb drive. The list of ready software grows more daily and includes all things from web browsers (Mozilla Firefox) to antivirus scanners (Avast!) and much more.

Storage Capacity

As advances in flash storehouse technology continue to break the barriers on storehouse capacity, thumb drives will continue to hold more and more information. And do it at an increasingly lower cost. A 2Gb thumb drive today costs about what a 256 Mb drive cost only 2 years ago. Drives as large as 4 Gb are now available, with larger sizes not too far off in the future.

Personal storehouse absolutely has come a long way since the days of the floppy. Usb thumb drives are cheap, portable, reliable, durable, and hold much more data than any floppy ever dreamed of. For transporting your data from one place to another, there's no better selection than a thumb drive. And with new technology, your thumb drive can roughly be a movable resource, carrying your web browser, media player, photos and more right along with you wherever you go.

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